Port after stormy seas, ease after war
Allan Mallinson
A WORLD OVERTURNED: A BURMESE CHILDHOOD, 1933-47 by Maureen Baird-Murray Constable, £15, pp. 224 This compelling story begins, like Carmen, in a cigarette factory, with a peas- ant girl and a man in uniform. In the early 1930s Edward Rossiter, a superintendent in the Burma Frontier Service, is overcome by the sight of Khin Nyun whom he spies packing cheroots. Soon afterwards they marry.
Photographs testify to her doll-like beauty, and marriage to Burmese girls was not as taboo as mixed marriage was in India, where the caste system made such a match practically impossible for Rossiter, a tall and clean-cut Anglo-Irishman in the classic mould of the colonial adminis- trator.
A daughter is born, the book's author. At first the child's world is idyllic — all jasmine flowers and the scent of sweet peas. Then it begins to darken. In 1938, when not yet five years old, and speaking only Burmese, she is taken suddenly and without explanation to a boarding school run by Italian nuns. Here she meets the dreadful Sister Seraphina who scolds and beats her mercilessly, foaming at the mouth as she wields the cane. The abuse stops only when she blurts out one day that she wants to become a Catholic.
Her mother visits infrequently, her father almost never, and she is dimly aware of something amiss. Then her mother starts taking her out of school to stay in the village in which she herself had grown up. Life here is bliss for the child, but after a while she notices a change in her mother. At the end of term, in December 1941, no one comes to fetch her from school. On Christmas Day the Japanese bomb Rangoon.
Japanese soldiers arrive at the convent a few months later and she never sees, or hears from, her parents again. The nuns, being Italian, are treated suspiciously by their allies but generally left alone, and the child, with neutrals' status as the daughter of an Irishman (the nuns concealing the material facts), is not interned. The war is tolerable, and sometimes an adventure, but there is no news whatever of her parents. When Italy surrenders in 1943 life becomes more precarious, and even worse after the Japanese reverses in north-west Burma the following year. Tension mounts as the occupiers begin to recoil in the face of the Allied offensive, wounded and fugitive soldiers visiting the convent in the night for help.
In the spring of 1945 the British return and the child is sought out by old family friends, and by her mother's relatives. She learns that both parents are dead — and then even more bad news. But although this is a moving story, it is not at heart a wholly sad one. Maureen Baird-Murray rejoices now in her faith, even if it was fostered in so bleak a fashion, and there is a happy twist to the ending. Perhaps her story is not so different from countless others in the winds of war. What makes it intriguing, however, is that she might so easily have reverted to being Thakin Ma Le, a simple village girl like her mother, for in 1947 a Burmese uncle arrived at the con- vent to take her home. Only days before, however, she had heard — for the first time — a call of kinship from Ireland. And though her Burmese village was the only place she had known real peace and happi- ness, she resolved to answer that distant call.
Maureen Baird-Murray tells her story with astonishing, but convincing, recall and with a childlike freshness which vividly recaptures the time and place. Her son-in- law works for Constable and it was he who pressed her story on them. It is as well, for it might otherwise have been over- whelmed by racier, though less engaging, manuscripts, and that indeed would have been a loss.
'It sort of made life exciting. I miss DDT.'
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